


the weirdest thing in New York

by tritonreverse



Series: you know what that is? growth [4]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, more like john mulaney question mark?, petunia the dog is in here too, sometimes you just wonder what a mulaney joke about spiderman would sound like
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-06
Updated: 2019-05-06
Packaged: 2020-02-26 21:32:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,659
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18725395
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tritonreverse/pseuds/tritonreverse
Summary: (spoilers for Avengers: Endgame)a woman, her dog, a would-be car burglar, and spider-man





	the weirdest thing in New York

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for Avengers: Endgame. You were warned.

“ **PETER. MULANEY MENTIONED YOU.** ”

The voice emanating from Peter’s phone was entirely too loud for 1:30 a.m, and definitely too loud for a night when MJ was pretty sure she was asleep on the floor. She almost yanked the blanket over her head _(wait, how had she ended up with a blanket?)_ when what that voice had actually said sunk into her still-sleepy head.

“Wait, what?” Peter whispered, aware of the fact that it was, indeed, after midnight and as cool as May was, she wasn’t _you can yell about things at one a.m._ cool. Ned was apparently operating under no such restriction while on vacation, because he continued at a only slightly lower volume, still loud enough for MJ to hear clearly with the phone not even on speaker.

“Mulaney! John Mulaney! He was on Late Night tonight, and tested a new bit, you know, about superheros and like, you know, Mulaney, and mentioned Spider-Man!”

Peter sat straight upright next to her, causing the blanket to pull away from her shoulders. _(hang on, they were both on the floor. Oh, no, she remembered. They’d marathoned Doctor Who all evening, and they must have both passed out...somewhere around fish fingers and custard. God, what overly engineered meme-bait that was.)_ MJ made a grumpy noise, but sat up, too, scooting back to sit against the couch.

“No **_way,_ **” Peter said, slightly too loudly, then visibly winced and looked down the hallway towards May’s room.

Honestly, this was one of MJ’s favorite things about him, though she would rather have her fingernails pulled out than admit it. He was a hero, one of the brave who had stood up against things she’d rather not imagine, and not just that, but one who stood up against the things she had all too much personal experience with. Yet, somehow, he was still surprised every time he made it onto the news, or into a pop culture reference, or in this instance, into a John Mulaney joke. Not just surprised, but a childlike wonder that would have made her queasy, coming from almost anyone else.

_(There was the other part of this, as well, the reason Ned or MJ or both spent more nights than not on that berber-covered floor, the reason the TV was still on, Fire stick screensaver floating, the reason that Peter woke so sharply to the vibrations of Ned’s call. It was amazing that Peter had been asleep to wake up, honestly.)_

Conceding that she was, actually, awake, and wasn’t going to go back to sleep any time soon, MJ pulled the remote towards her with her toes. _Late Night_ was great about posting their segments to YouTube right after they aired, which meant that instead of trying to get Ned’s garbled impression of whatever mention of Spider-Man there’d been, they could watch it from the source. Flipping the TV to casting mode, she made grabby-hand motions at Peter’s laptop.

Indeed, there it was. _John Mulaney’s Wife Met Spiderman While Carrying A Dog._ She threw it up to the TV, and grabbed Peter’s phone out of his hand.

“Yo, loud guy. I’ve got it pulled up here.” Ned obligingly shut up, and she hit _play,_ and skipped past the introductions.

 

> “...so I’ve told you how my wife saw Woody Allen and Soon-Yi Previn while she was pushing our french bulldog in a stroller, yes?” Mulaney barely waited for Seth Meyers’ nod. “Well, apparently she has some kind of attraction factor for the strangest things in New York, she or Petunia - Petunia being the dog. She took Petunia out to the park, but didn’t take the stroller, because, well, it was three blocks and we occasionally forget how bad at being a dog she is. Please imagine this, everyone. My wife, who is a five-foot tall woman of terrifying intensity, carrying a something-pound aging bulldog like a sack of flour down a New York City sidewalk, which in itself is not one of the stranger things happening on that New York City sidewalk that day. In fact, there was exactly one thing stranger happening.”
> 
> “Oh, go on,” said Seth Meyers.
> 
> “So my wife is there, holding Petunia, about a block from our apartment, and several things happen at once. There’s a guy trying to break into a car - New York City, am I right? - and then his hand is stuck to the car, and then there’s Spiderman. And so she’s staring at Spiderman, and Spiderman is staring at this tiny woman holding an overweight aging dog in her arms, because the dog is just too tired to walk 900 more feet, and there’s a car thief there and none of them quite know what to do about each other.”
> 
> “So what did your wife do?” Seth Meyers kind of squacked that out, about two seconds away from collapsing on his desk in laughter.
> 
> “She nodded at Spiderman and brought Petunia home! If it’d been me, I probably would have, I don’t know, asked if he wanted help or if he could hold the dog or I don’t know, something, apologized for being in the way.”

 

Seth Meyers threw to break and MJ paused the video, saving them from hearing the deeply annoying theme music. She glanced over at Peter, the blue light from the TV throwing his cheekbones into even sharper relief. He was smiling, but there was something in it, the tightness of his jaw. It pinched her somewhere she didn’t want to admit to having, so she elbowed him and took satisfaction in his surprised gasp.

“Geez, MJ, that’s gonna bruise,” he said, and Ned chimed in, now on speakerphone, “oh, did she elbow you? Good, because you hadn’t said anything isn’t this the coolest it’s Mulaney do you think you could get in to his next NY show if you went as Spid-”

MJ interrupted. “Ned. Breathe. There are more important questions, like, what were you doing stopping a car robbery in Manhattan?”

Peter laughed. “Oh, you know, stopping a car robbery in Manhattan.”

MJ elbowed him again, harder this time. He grimaced, and pulled his knees up to his chest.

“Okay, fine, I was just. . .honestly, I was just walking around on top of buildings. Looking at the city.”

MJ knew exactly what he’d been doing. Manhattan still had the stamp of Tony Stark on it, even though the Avengers had decamped upstate. MJ hadn’t lost anyone _(she’d only lost five years, in which she’d lost friends to the passage of time and yeah maybe they would have grown apart but to have the choice taken away from her? and the world changed forever?)_ but Peter kept losing people, his parents and his uncle and now this part of his life that MJ’d never really known. She knew enough, in the bits and pieces he’d let slip, but he otherwise seemed so determined to keep it under wraps, throw himself back into the dual life of being Peter Parker, forgetful genius and sweet dude, and the Friendly Neighborhood Spiderman, who was a superhero, and untouchable.

It was just Peter, though, who fell asleep in class, who jumped a mile if you touched his shoulder, who went silent and still any time Flash mentioned Tony Stark’s name, and it was just Peter who was sitting there next to her. She stared at the paused image of Seth Meyers’ self-deprecating smile without really seeing it, feeling lost. _(honestly the worst feeling in the world, she was Michelle Jones who (a) didn’t have feelings and (b) definitely didn’t ever feel lost about what to do with them.)_

It was Ned who broke the silence that had started to stretch uncomfortably, over the phone in his perfectly Ned-like way.

“Did you know it was Anna?”

Peter laughed, still quiet but much more like himself.

“No, I just thought it was weird, this tiny lady and her dog. I was more concerned that the dude trying to break into the car might have a weapon and hurt her but if he did he never went for it. And it did happen exactly like he said, I was staring at her and at the dude, she was just looking at me, and then she just kinda...nodded, like, okay, and then left! Still carrying that ridiculous dog.”

MJ snorted.

“Okay, I can understand why you didn’t mention it to us until now,” she said, and let Ned finish as she knew he would “but if it had been Mulaney himself and you didn’t mention it I’d have to disown you, bro.”

Peter grabbed the phone off the blanket and put it back up to his ear, ending the conversation with a brief chat and a _miss you, dude._ When the screen went dark, he sat there, turning it over slowly, staring down at his lap. He suddenly looked older than his age, older than any of them should be, and weary. _(It scared MJ, the way he looked sometimes when he thought she wasn’t looking, or maybe when he knew only she was looking.)_

She bumped his shoulder with hers, not quite leaning into him but definitely close enough to feel the slightly unnatural warmth of his body. She didn’t know what to say, or how to say it, but she thought Peter knew anyway. They sat like that, almost touching, just being in each other’s existence for a solid ten minutes before Peter bumped her shoulder back, and reached over her for the remote.

“One more episode?” he asked, waking the TV back up. She reached up behind her and snagged a pillow off the couch, one of the suspiciously comfortable throw pillows that had shown up around the time she and Ned had started coming over to study late into the night more often.

“What, you’re not filled with the sudden urge to turn on a comedy special?” she joked, and then immediately relented. “One more episode.”

**Author's Note:**

> So, I started writing this before Endgame, saw Endgame, then it went from pure comedy to feelings, which both me as author and MJ are uncomfortable with but I cried glitter down my face for Tony so here we are! (Literal glitter. I had an eyeshadow moment.) 
> 
> My thoughts and feelings on Endgame are multitudinous and while I tend to be a fairly canon-adherent writer, we’ll see! Also what is canon in comics, everything is a ball of wibbly-wobbly stuff.


End file.
